Retailers talk about omnichannel and customer-centricity, but look at the landscape: it’s hard to be optimistic. Doug Stephens paints a vivid picture of the massive disruption and reinvention that is occurring in retail. Reengineering Retail offers valuable insights into how the physical and the digital retailing worlds will combine to create customer experiences we.
Doug Stephens’ latest book, Reengineering Retail, shines the spotlight on the new retail ecosystem, one that feeds off. Dedicated to all those who keep their heads in the clouds and their feet o the ground, those with the courage to. Consumers want goods and services to be commoditized so they can spend their hard- earned money, and their harder-earned time, on the experiences they value so much more highly.
Retail expert Doug Stephens lays out the stark choice retailers have in the face of these forces: create innovative experiences or be commoditized. Providing a tour of what is being done now and what is possible in the future, Doug lays out a roadmap that you can follow in determining what the store of the future should be—.
RETAIL IS DEAD
In fact, the most profitable arm of the company is not the retail business at all but the much smaller Amazon Web. In fact, a titanic 56 percent of Amazon’s total operating income comes from AWS, despite sales in the division amounting to less than 9 percent of the company’s total revenue.1. It’s worth noting that in June of 2016 Lundgren stepped out of his role as the CEO of Macy’s in the face of declining sales, and one month later, Bezos became the third-richest man on Earth.
So, if you’re a retailer, the mathematical reality of the situation should be sinking in. And even more unnerving, by 2020, Amazon, Alibaba and eBay alone will have secured an estimated 39 percent of the global online retail market. MY WORK PUTS me at fifty or so retail industry events in various parts of the world each year, and so I meet a tremendous number of people in the field.
As a marketer, you knew how many people in a market took delivery of the daily newspaper. For Ritson, it comes down to a fundamental failure on the part of brands to recognize that they are “the third wheel” in social media. Forrester Research estimates that by 2020 more than 85 percent of all handsets in the world will be smartphones.
When will the inordinate expansion in online commerce normalize to the growth rate of the retail market as a whole.
MEDIA IS THE STORE
At the same time, others are positioning “omnichannel” as the cure-all to retail’s problems. At the top of the old purchase funnel sat the need to build awareness, an objective achieved largely with the help of. At the bottom of the funnel sat the purchase, which was traditionally executed at a physical store.
As long as the store had adequate stock of the advertised item and the staff had a modicum of product knowledge, all they needed to do was to transact the sale. You name it, and I can buy directly from any form of media in the world. Every piece of media, every device, every available surface, including our bodies, will be the store—if we want them to be.
In 2009, Procter & Gamble began briefing its agencies on what was at the time a completely different and somewhat radical. Put simply, store- back was centered on the belief that if a marketing idea of any kind couldn’t execute effectively at the point of purchase, it simply wasn’t worth investing in. No path to purchase, no influence from marketing along the way and no consideration at the shelf required.
I estimate that a minimum of 25 percent of the consumer decisions we occupy ourselves with today will be entirely relegated to. In a world with DRS, Amazon could potentially become the default provider for entire aisles of the average grocery store, without the consumer ever having to consciously purchase any of the items. If you’re Budweiser, how do you appeal to the taste buds of a sensor that’s buried in the guts of a refrigerator and.
If you’re Tesco, Walmart or Target, how do you get even a sliver of a market in which Amazon DRS lives inside most of the. In most cases, they will merely act as the front line of the customer service experience, reducing wait times for customer engagement and acting as triage for initial queries. It’s just that over an increasing period of time, computer-driven bots will become more human-feeling, to the point where the user can’t detect the difference, and will interact with either human agent or computer bot in roughly the same interaction paradigm.”.
SPEAK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE
Facebook is one of the companies that have been expanding the role of chatbots beyond the call center. To date, one of the most compelling examples of this has been Amazon’s Echo, a device introduced to the general market in 2015. Imagine a world where you could bring your friends along with you to shop in any store in the world.
Much of the problem stems from shoppers’ inherent inability to fully understand what they’re buying online until they receive it. Rubin notes, “We believe people deserve to go back to the good old days.” He continues, “ e days when you could try a product before buying it.” In Rubin’s view, “VR can give. Using the Marriott mobile app, guests of the chain’s hotels can request delivery of a virtual reality headset to their.
And if Katherine Kuchenbecker has anything to do with it, we will also be able to touch and feel every product in the virtual world. As she points out, the inability to touch and feel the products we shop for online has, from the beginning, been one of the most significant drawbacks for ecommerce, especially in the apparel and furniture categories. A place where you can see, feel and interact with any product on the face of the Earth.
Imagine perceiving the scent of the leather sofa you’re considering, or being able to sample. Social media firm Spredfast reported that in the week following its release, Pokémon Go generated more tweets than Brexit did during the week of the U.K. To get a sense of the degree to which Magic Leap might change our online experiences, one only has to take a look at the key.
In Menaker’s vision of the future, the customer will come in to the showroom in the morning, help design their vehicle over. He’s a decorated American chemist, one of fewer than twenty people to be elected to all three branches of the National. DeSimone says, “ e way I look at it is, the ability to fabricate stuff has been the prowess and ownership of the rich and powerful.
In the not- too-distant future, companies will be able to create fully bespoke, high-quality products at a scale and cost that was previously. It will be a complete rethinking of the entire supply chain—and it will change the face of both retail and manufacturing forever.
THE STORE IS MEDIA
Thousands of shoppers line up for blocks to attend the Apple store’s launch of the iPhone 6 in New York City.ROBERT CICCHETTI. In other words, it was not the reward itself, but the anticipation of the reward that prompted the greatest release of dopamine to the brain. One by one, companies have been stepping out of the digital realm and manifesting in the strange physical reality we call stores.
If real estate is a ball and chain dragging brands to the bottom of the retail ocean, why on earth are these companies investing in it. Millennials are those born between 1984 and 2004, and they are quite possibly one of the most overanalyzed and yet. Instead, the goal of the store will be to create experiences so powerful that they catalyze sales across all available purchase points and channels.
I realize that this vision of the future is hard to square up with retail as we know it today. In other words, this shopping space of the future actually exists today, just not all in one place. But look closely enough and you’ll see fragments of the future of retail scattered ever so finely.
Great retailers of the future will build their shopping spaces less as stores and more as remarkable places that put story at the nucleus of the shopping experience. For example, every attribute of the first Apple store—including store design, merchandising, staffing, service methodology and in-store technology—supported the brand story “ ink Different” and the battle cry of defying the status quo. Bandier and brands like it are a call-out to all retailers that the shopping space of the future will be more a gathering point for communities of interest.
Conversion, once a key metric, will be of little importance to the retailer of the future. First, even today transactions tell us very little about the qualitative value of the shopper experience. In short, the role of the shopping space of the future will not be to convert shoppers into buyers; it will be to turn shoppers into fanatical, lifelong converts and advocates for the brand.
In other words, it’s time to blow up the paradigm of what a retail store is and has been and imagine instead what the retail store of the future can and will become. Imagine how many experiences of this sort could ultimately play out in the big-box retail space of the future.